The game clearly ends only when it crashes at the very end. The main reason the timing ends early on killing Shrek is that's what the top runners of this game have been doing. I think the reason for this timing at first was that otherwise it would add an extra 40 seconds to the run that's always the same and can't be saved. So basically I consider it to be just a way of reporting the lowest possible time to make the run seem faster. Some of the early runs of this game reported the game-crash time and they had to be retimed to the Shrek kill.
The history of serious world record runners for this game was Newt0570, then me, then huggsTV, then kjhark24. In all these runs but huggsTV, the entire ending plays out to the end, but huggsTV died after killing Shrek. I didn't want to reject a potential world record run due to mostly arbitrary rules that weren't clearly said anyway, so I verified the run. Besides this, I also verified other much slower runs that didn't make it to the end because I thought following strict rules on a meme game like this would be kind of dumb. So by now the precedent is to accept runs that don't make it to the end. (Edit: I forgot about 3dorz. He survived but didn't record to the end.)
What's bad about this precedent is first that viewers don't get to see the game all the way through. A speedrun is a show as much as a competition and it makes a worse show for them. Second, people might not take the runs seriously if they end in a way that seem too arbitrary for them. So it could hurt the "integrity" of the leaderboard and the legitimacy of the achievement of the top runners, if anyone cares about that.
But I think the rules of a speedrun should reflect the conventions of the speedrunning community. And the "community" for this game is a bunch of newbies dropping in who can't be bothered to learn the strats or follow standards for timing. It's always been this way. So I think lax moderation is best for this game.
So I think the policy should be to strongly encourage runs making it to the game-crash at the end, but not actually enforcing it. I'll update the rules to reflect this. If you disagree you can argue about it here. This isn't supposed to be a final ruling by me.
IMO, the extra time post-shrek is pretty much filler and just inflates the run's time. I think that anything after the kill shouldn't really be counted
I mean it's a meme game, I don't think we really have viewers in the first place so deciding to change the rules for the sake of virtually non existent viewers doesn't make much sense to me. I mean for sure if you do survive leave it in your vod when you submit it but again I don't see much of a reason to change the current rules
To kjhark: It doesn't change the rules in that runs will still be accepted whether they survive to the end or not, just as before. What it does is make more standard what a completed run should look like. I can't tell if you agree with this point or not. If you disagree and think it doesn't matter at all then you can change it back, but personally I always cringe a little when the run doesn't make it to what I consider to be the end.
To redduxr: I strongly disagree, but I don't want to continue typing out long arguments for how speedruns should be done here, so whatever.
